That this determination to look at his art in the broadest possible spirit was the dominant factor in his success is continually evident at every point in his career. The breadth and sincerity of this view are so faithfully reflected in every single work he achieved that it seems rather to character than to genius that he owes his high place among painters. That it was not so may be readily admitted when we remember other painters--for instance, Benjamin West and George Morland--who were gifted with one or other of those two qualities only; but the combination of the two carried Reynolds as high as Gainsborough, and far higher than any one else. “One who has a genius,” he writes (as early as 1759), “will comprehend in his idea the whole of his work at once; whilst he who is deficient in genius amuses himself in trifling parts of small consideration, attends with scrupulous exactness to the minuter matters only, which he finishes to a nicety, whilst the whole together has a very ill effect.” This striving after generalisation, seeing things whole, is noticed by Edmund Burke as almost the chief characteristic of Reynolds’s genius. Malone requested Burke to “throw his thoughts on paper relative to Sir Joshua,” at the time when he was preparing his Life, and Burke complied with the request in the following short summary, which is printed in Leslie and Taylor’s Life of Sir Joshua. “He was a great generaliser, and was fond of reducing everything to one system; more, perhaps, than the variety of principles which operate in the human mind, and in every human work, will properly endure. But this disposition to abstractions, generalisations and classifications is the great glory [Illustration: MRS. CARNAC 1778. Wallace Collection, London] of the human mind; that, indeed, which most distinguishes man from other animals, and is the source of everything that can be called science. “I believe his early acquaintance with Mr. Mudge, of Exeter [the Rev. Zachariah Mudge, a dissenting minister], a very learned and thinking man, much inclined to philosophise in the spirit of the Platonists, disposed him to this habit. He certainly by that means liberalised in a high degree the theory of his own art; and if he had been more methodically instituted in the early part of his life, and had possessed more leisure for study and reflection, he would in my opinion have pursued this method with great success. “He had a strong turn for humour, and well saw the weak sides of things. He enjoyed every circumstance of his good fortune and had no affectation on that subject. And I do not know a fault or weakness of his that he did not convert into something that bordered on a virtue, instead of pushing it to the confines of a vice. E. B.”